The following strategies focus on preparing students to be successful on high stakes tests:
Teach essential before-reading, during-reading and after-reading strategies all day, every day from the beginning of the school year.
Focus reading instruction on a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction genres during the school year – you never know what text genres will be used on the test. (story, memoir, "how to" books, poetry, nonfiction with multiple text features [e.g., graphs charts, tables, maps, photos and captions, diagrams, table of contents, index, glossary, fact boxes, footnotes].
Teach students to read test questions first in order to set purposes for reading.
Teach students NOT to skip questions when they are not sure. Research shows that this can lower scores of incomplete responses or messing up alignment of multiple choices with subsequent questions. Teach students to put their best choice and then review if there is time.
Emphasize reading “everything on the page” (print and nonprint) because questions can focus on information that goes beyond the narrative.
Teach to preview questions first that sets purpose for reading and guides reading.
Teach Question-Answer Relationships (Q-A-R): Right there, think-and-search, in my head.
For constructed responses, emphasize “show everything you know.”
Use a wide variety of graphic organizers because tests often require students to complete some type of graphic organizers (e.g, story map, sequence charts, KWL)
If a test has writing components, teach students to make notes to preplan their essays.
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